Mask
by Scarabbug
Summary: Her real name is Shayera Hol. That much is true, at least


**An extremely short one shot. It's not my best, but it's been buzzing around my head for a few days, and I'm trying to get back into of writing these guys with what little time is currently available today. **

**This is set early in Justice League –around Season One or Two, **_**before**_** Unlimited. **

* * *

Mask.

Her real name is Shayera Hol.

That much is true, at least. There had been no need for her to conjure up some fake name and identity; at least not when her Mission first began, anyway. Thangar was so far across the galaxy that the Lantern Corps didn't even have it on their Outer Patrol route. There had been no chance of her real name being uncovered in some secret government file. No chance of being found out... Not so long as she kept her cover story straight and simple, anyway.

Her name is Shayera Hol of Thanagar; she's a detective, she catches bad guys and locks them up, she got warped thousands of light-years away from home by a bunch of stray Zeta Rays. The people on her planet probably don't even know whether she's alive.

That last part is the lie. A highly effective one.

Or at least, it usually is. There _are_ moments...

Moments like this one, in the stillness of the empty corridors. The tower is big enough to house about a hundred people –and yet there are only ever seven of them, at most. Two, today –her and J'onn, and she has no idea where the Martian is or what he's doing. It's late. What on earth would have been called "the dark hour before dawn", and Shayera is walking the corridors slowly not feeling the slightest bit tired, brushing the walls with her fingertips and listening to the silence.

The Watchtower's corridors look quite a bit like the military faculties on Thanagar, actually. But it's not the same. There are no _sounds_ here: no distant calling and barked out orders from superiors; no rushing of thermal air through the open windows of high towers. Space is dull and quiet and feels totally stagnant to the point of being bizarre. Shayera remembers the first time she came here, the sensation of uncertainty (which had nothing whatsoever to do with the lie) prickling in every fibre of her being and every feather on her back.

This kind of uneasiness is something all Thanagarians are familiar with. Claustrophobia amongst their kind is not uncommon, and comes from their species having to spend so much time in space (in battle) these days –away from the reassuring pull of gravity beneath their wings, and away from the solid assurance that flapping them will _get_ you somewhere.

It's a sensation bred into her by millennia: something _felt_ wrong with the Watch Tower: this place that felt so solid and bound by gravity, and yet floated weightless in space.

If course, the more used to it she gets, the more she fears that she's losing touch with Thangar. Losing Shayera Hol to this strange new Hawkgirl, who wants nothing more than to save lives and remember who she is.

Sometimes it's difficult for her to remember. And Shayera _knows_ how dangerous that is. She knows she can't afford to make a mistake. It's all so much simpler when she's outside of this space-borne tin can. When she's out there in the open air, wind rushing through her feathers in that old, familiar way, and her (fake) name is being splashed all over the news. There'd been a few choice rumours early on, about a strange, winged creature hanging over the hills, a few news reports about supernatural freak outs and angels and... something weird about a race of moth people...

And then she showed herself to the public by saving a bunch of kids near a waterfall. They called her "Hawkgirl" and the name stuck. After that, the papers and news broadcasts pretty much did all her work for her. She didn't even have to _try_ to gain their trust. And then she met Superman, and he was all willing and trusting and _open_, like if he hadn't been hovering three feet above the ground at the time, she would've sworn that he was human. Hawkgirl's mask fell into place as easily as his smile.

Hawkgirl knows exactly who she is. Hawkgirl was defined in the moment she pulled a screaming child out of a fast flowing river. If she were a philosophical person (which she isn't) Shayera would have said that Hawkgirl was born in that very moment, in the icy coldness of the rapids.

But Shayera Hol is different. Shayera Hol has struggled all her life through the ranks of the Military Police, leaping from one job to another, one mission to the next. She fought her share of battles, claimed her share of mates and was claimed in return. She lived her life in a world that was, for the most part, free of the complications of religion and magic (_good old Nth Metal_) and whether or not their planet was round or flat.

Not that the humans worried about such things anymore. From up here in space standing in a window of bullet-proof plastic, Shayera knows the shape of the earth well enough. She knows all of its contours and cloud patterns and where the ice caps formed...

She wasn't ever supposed to know more than that. She wasn't supposed to acknowledge the shape and textures of the earth as beautiful. Or at all like Thangar.

She wonders for a few, brief, distorted seconds whether she might be going insane, or whether it's just the silence and emptiness of space making her feel this way. Shayera Hol and Hawkgirl are getting mixed up inside of her head. There is the memory of duty and patriotism, of laying her hand on her mace and swearing her life on success. Of battlefields and war. Of her lover's eyes, torn between hope and fear in that moment when she told him she had been the one chosen out of thousands of eligible candidates. Their last night together... The Zeta Beams (artificial, _not_ natural) ripping into her flesh, turning her world inside out, and sending her twisting and flailing into _just_ the right location. Then there is ice cold water, a child's screams, the memories of two lives are mixing up inside of her, and Shayera/Hawkgirl thinks: _I've forgotten. I've forgotten everything. I've forgotten which of them is me. _

Except that she really hasn't.

No, Shayera Hol knows exactly who she is. She knows exactly who she's _pretending_ to be. It isn't Hawkgirl who needs to feel guilty about what she is forced (no, _choosing_) to do to the people of earth.

There is a little more to it than that.


End file.
